Web browsing is an increasingly common behavior. When a user browses a particular web site, the operator of that web site can collect significant volumes of information about the user's interaction with the web site. As one way of deriving value from such collected user data, a web site operator may wish to divide the users that visit its web site into groups, such that the members in each group share one or more significant characteristics or behaviors. This process of dividing users into groups is termed segmentation, and the groups are called segments. As one example, one segment of users for a sporting goods web site may be those users who visited any of the pages of a section of the web site devoted to fishing in the past 2 weeks.
User data is typically stored in a database, and can be extremely voluminous for a popular web site. The process of segmenting users based on user data is called segment population. In order to perform segment population, the operator of a web site must generally write custom code to manipulate the user data stored in the database to identify the members of each segment. This is time-consuming, requires the services of a skilled programmer, and can be quite expensive.
Also, because the set of segments to be populated and the tests used to identify the members of each segment in the set are typically embodied by the custom code, if a consumer of the segments wants to specify and populate a new segment after the original custom programming is complete, additional custom code must be written.
Further, it can be inefficient to analyze data within the database in order to perform segment population. This makes it expensive to use segments, and may limit the frequency with which segments can be repopulated, in turn limiting the currency of segment populations.
In view of the aforementioned shortcomings of conventional user segmentation techniques, a facility for automatically populating segments in an efficient way based upon plain-English segment definitions that can be prepared by users other than programmers would have significant utility.